Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

System and Auction Overview

  • Cheyenne is a 2016 SGI ICE XA supercomputer: 4,032 dual-socket nodes (8,064 E5‑2697v4 CPUs, 145,152 cores), 313 TB DDR4, EDR InfiniBand hypercube topology, peak ~5.34 PFLOPS FP64, ~1.7 MW power draw.
  • Racks are heavy (up to ~47 tons total system weight); specially cooled E‑cells and water-cooled racks.
  • Reserve price reported as $100k; final sale reported around $480k, roughly the then-estimated CPU resale value.

Part-Out Economics and Practical Constraints

  • Many see the real value in CPUs and RAM: per-CPU eBay prices imply hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential resale.
  • Counterpoints:
    • Flooding the market could depress prices, and demand for 2016-era Xeons is limited and slow-moving.
    • Significant costs for professional movers, insurance, trucking, warehousing, and labor to disassemble, test, and list parts; some estimates put moving plus labor near six figures.
    • Much of the non-CPU gear (cooling units, custom chassis) may be near scrap value.

Possible Buyers and Uses

  • Likely buyers: recyclers/part-out resellers, low-budget academic groups, niche hosting or homelab enthusiasts.
  • Reassembling the full cluster is seen as unlikely due to power, cooling, and licensing/management complexity.
  • Some wish it could go to a museum, but maintaining and powering it even occasionally is a major burden.

Efficiency, Obsolescence, and Comparisons

  • Several argue it’s uneconomical to run: 1.7 MW implies thousands of dollars per day in electricity, while modern CPUs/GPUs or MI300X-class accelerators can match or exceed FP64 throughput at a fraction of power.
  • Others note its value as a general-purpose x86 cluster with mature MPI/Linux tooling, versus the programming effort to exploit modern GPUs.

Cooling Design and Reliability

  • Liquid-assisted cooling is framed as standard in large HPC for density and efficiency versus massive air systems.
  • Decommissioning was partly driven by failing quick-disconnects causing water spray and aging RAM, reinforcing the maintenance burden.

Nostalgia and Supercomputing Culture

  • Multiple comments express fascination and nostalgia for big iron (SGI, Cray, Origin/NUMA systems) and regret over the difficulty of preserving such machines.
  • There’s tension between viewing it as a cool artifact and acknowledging it as outdated, power-hungry technology best treated as parts.